Tristram Korten/Florida Trident

Seth Miller visited his client at North Florida’s Jackson Correctional Institution in February of 2019 with some good news. The client, Thomas Gilbert, was serving a life sentence for a 1973 murder in North Miami Beach he always said he didn’t commit.That afternoon, Miller, the executive director of the Innocence Project of Florida, informed Gilbert they had discovered powerful new evidence of his innocence that included police files from 1977 containing an entire reinvestigation of his case with multiple witness statements saying Gilbert was not present, the results of a polygraph Gilbert took “exculpating” him, and a confession from a man who said he was the one who actually committed the murder.

Tampa political consultant Anthony Pedicini is at the height of his success. The single 44-year-old Republican operative with the trademark shaved head lives in a million-dollar six-bedroom home in Tampa’s upscale Beach Park neighborhood. He drives luxury cars and enjoys “fine wines,” “finer scotches” and the “finest cigars” as he boasts on X. And he has achieved all this by winning elections across the state.